Friday, July 31, 2015

Yet another link, but it's a good 'un

﻿The misuse of sexual-harassment policies by pusillanimous college administrators is creating a campus panic.

The article outlines examples of student over-sensitivity, not to mention plain old blackmail for a higher grade, that have occurred recently. One professor was told that the student would file a complaint that she felt unsafe in his class unless he raised her B+. Another was fired, without warning, for holding the same role-playing class session on social stratification among prostitutes that she had been running every year for 20 years. ﻿“People would be well advised to quake in their boots when they hear they’re being investigated.”

But sometimes things work out in the end...

[The blackmailed professor] gave in to a combination of administrative pressure and fear of being forced to endure the bureaucratic gauntlet of a sexual-harassment investigation. One administrator, he says, told him that while he could fight the potential charges, “at the end of the day he was like don’t bother, it doesn’t even matter. It’s just a stupid grade.” Levinson changed it.

Then, when his fellowship was over and he’d left campus, he logged back in the system and changed it back.

Damn it to hell. The "right" to not be offended has burgeoned into the "right" not to be made to feel uncomfortable. Getting your head stretched to accomodate new ideas is sometimes uncomfortable, and what is higher ed but new ideas?

I wouldn't have thought it could sink any lower, but it has, and now I have no hope that it won't sink even further. "It’s just a stupid grade." Really? The wardens have forgotten their mission, have become afraid of the inmates, and are throwing the guards under the bus. The asylum is already lost, and the country will follow. Fuck this trainwreck ride, I want off.

The situation where the educator was in charge or even part of an institution was a historical anomaly. Historically, educators used to be slaves or hired help in the service of the students' families (or, on occasion, of the students themselves) and were not assigning any grades. They would just teach, and students would learn (or not).

Why do you want to be authority figures who can assign grades instead of being like tutors in the service of people who want to learn a particular skill? If you are a gifted teacher, you can do it that way too. You may even find it more rewarding.

You can teach online, for example at Udemy. With some exceptions, it is also perfectly legal to just teach your own courses without going through any established institution. For instance, if you can give piano lessons, you can just go ahead and do it.

Moreover, universities, too, should get rid of grades. They should just provide the education. If the courses are not very good or students never get the outside credentials they want, they'll just stop attending that particular university. Because the credentials, if any, should be obtained by passing some kind of certification exams similar to those that actually exist for certain professions such as law or accounting.

Those exams need not take place in a university setting, nor should they require any particular degree or university courses. It's just that, naturally, people need to acquire the required skills somehow and they may have better chances if they get a formal education. If studying some other way, including with or without a tutor or at some kind of unaccredited school, worked better, that should be perfectly fine in such a system.

The analogy doesn't work. I'm not saying that there would be no evaluation, although that would probably happen for some skills. It's just that it would be more fair and objective. After all, most schools won't fail all of their students. The certification board would fail anybody who does not possess the skills. The human factors related to the pressure to pass students or the pity one may fell for some of them would not be part of the equation.

Concretely, let's say you are teaching Swahili. If there is a Swahili certification board, students can get certified there as fluent speakers of Swahili (or as having some kind of limited level of fluency). They can do it before, after or during the courses they take with you. Obviously, they cannot do that if there is no Swahili certification board. They may also want to wait until they know the language well enough before they try to take the tests. If you don't teach them much, they just won't take your courses any more. But you don't have to decide whether they learned enough to pass your course. If there is some kind of certificate of completion for the course itself, it is based on attendance or on having completed a number of tasks (watching all the online videos, for example).

Worked like a charm. Since you agree that some kind of ongoing assessment is useful well before the high-stakes exam (collision), then I propose we use grades for that purpose. Such metrics are useful not only for both students and teachers in judging the health of their interaction, but also for agencies that fund these operations.

"We provide a service: we evaluate where students are every few weeks, so they can see how they're doing and what they need to improve."

Looks like I should have refreshed the page before I added my comment. Great minds.

I know from my own program (Advanced Hamstermobile Technology) that students' course grades correlate very well with their performance on 3rd-party certification exams they take at the end of our curriculum.

Third-party certification won't work for my discipline. The field is wide enough that no single certification could effectively cover all the useful skills, and it's narrow enough that creating a bevy of certifications would be overkill. Nobody's really interested in a third-party credential anyway. The field's professional association looked into creating one, but that move was seen as a money-grab and was quickly shouted down.

Dittoing what Dr. Mindbender said on the money-grab aspects of credentialing. It looks Fifa-esque in some fields.

As for not wishing to engage with Monica, I understand the reluctance. Monica's ways of thinking and writing style reminds me of former French colleagues and students. I sometimes wonder (in the nicest possible way) what Monica's first language is.

Can you elaborate on that, please? I'm really curious. Regarding my writing style, I promise not to get upset if you find my sentences too long, or something like that. Please let me know what's different or French-like. But what really puzzles me is the comment about the "ways of thinking". If you could explain that, I would really appreciate it.

There were emails about Monica? Quite interesting. I'm not saying this to dismiss anyone's view or out of disrespect, but I find myself wondering what they would say. "Somebody disagrees with me on the internet"?

I remember what I thought as I read Monica's first comment: so many buttons being pushed, so little time. I saw argumentum ad antiquitam, false dichotomy, presumption of my (or our) motivations ("why do you want to . . .") and other potential problems. The statement about being a "gifted teacher" could be taken as implying that we aren't gifted, as in "if you could do it, you'd already be doing it." Because Monica had miscalculated both my wants and (I suspect) those of the pupils being taught by their parents' slaves, I debated a one-word response, "Want," but thought meh, maybe later.

In our day jobs, some of what we do is make other people uncomfortable with their own ideas, and when others question our ideas, we present our evidence. Shouldn't we be able to handle the occasional discomfort here as well? (I'm not talking about tolerating outright trolling.) But then again, people do come here for refuge, not necessarily for argument. Argument is down the hall (Monty Python reference).

As much as I want to blame millennials for their poor behavior and the fear they’re able to instill in professors, I realize in reading the blog (and others) it’s the older generation that allows students to get away with this. The college administrators, who refuse to provide (or in some cases even allow) advocates for the accused, are middle-aged.

If the Emory student really did try to extort the professor I would hope that a few of the emails or screen shots of the student’s comments make their way to the Interwebz.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.